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Thursday, December 29, 2016

Recently, I was on the Steampunk Scholar,
reading through his many writings on Steampunk. Eventually, I came to his posts
where he dealt with some of his criticisms which he received over at
Ferratbrain. In short, a writer over there took issue with how the Steampunk
Scholar arrived at his thesis—that what we call ‘steampunk’ is not actually a
genre but rather an aesthetic. Reading through both the scholar’s incomplete
response and the critic’s original remarks, I felt compelled to think on how
Arthuriana functioned as a genre or aesthetic.

Now,
I must say this: I do not care much about genre. I am mildly fascinated by
aesthetics, but not by genre. Why is because I am one of those poststructualists
who does not believe that genre can be fitted into any inherent niche; what
constituted one genre, may, to another, constitute something wholly different.
The difference between genre, sub-genre, and how one should differentiate just
is not something which fascinates me as the debate often trickles down into
hair-splitting. I hold that there is something loosely defined as genre, in the
sense, that there is a sizable difference between what we call “High Fantasy”
and “Space Opera,” and that each of those specific sub-genres belong to
something which is, in turn, a sort of umbrella term for its numerous sub-sets,
but beyond that, I care not for trying to create a totality out of fragments.

So,
when it comes to the Arthurian tradition, what do we have? Should it be
classified as a genre or perhaps as an aesthetic?

Paradoxically,
I feel that Arthuriana can be both. Yet also more paradoxically, neither.

Let
me explain.

In
the Middle Ages, it is no doubt that the Arthurian legend constituted a genre;
much scholarship has elucidated how numerous texts—Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain, Chrétien
de Troyes’s Arthurian Romances,
Thomas Malroy’s Le Morte Darthur—were
either hugely influential on the legend or were outright blockbusters when it
came to circulation. People clearly used the legend to promote political
agendas as well as riddling out the great moral questions of life. Part of what
I feel constitutes a genre (or sub-genre) is how to reacts to the
social-material reality of its day, how it interacts with both the past and
future. The medieval King Arthur mythos did this and more, creating a thread
which, as controversial as it sounds, came to rival that of Jesus Christ.

But,
and here is where it gets sticky: if in the Middle Ages the Arthurian legend
constituted a genre, then it probably no longer even constitutes a sub-genre
(or however it is you want to define those ambiguous terms).

Why
this is, is very muddled. But it has to do with cultural fragmentation and the
decay of late capitalism. Essentially, what we see from the Early Modern Period
onwards, is an increasing cannibalization of the Arthurian tradition; it
becomes hacked piecemeal and integrated into numerous different genres and
aesthetics, its own originality as a moral or political genre, or as a
Christianized aesthetic, vanished.

Whereas
back in the medieval period you could clearly see people use the Arthurian
tradition for their own moral or political ends, while retaining the
characters, settings, and basic narrative outline, we do not see this (as much)
in our own epoch; rather, what we see is an act whereupon the Arthurian canon
has become a kind of literary means of subsistence for other genres and
aesthetics.

Essentially,
the Arthurian idea has become fodder: crime shows, modern romances, dramas,
action-adventures, and more, all use pieces of the Arthurian tradition, but
rarely anything more than that. So, Arthuriana has become inspiration rather than content in itself.

Contemporary
texts either appropriate fragments of the text—pushing the Roundtable idea of
unity, the titular female villain as a recurring antagonist with vague ties to
Morgan le Fay, serendipitously named characters, etc. – in order to make their
own text seem clever and intertextual, or, fail this, they cleave out narrative
devices, such as the Holy Grail vis-a-vie the Fisher King, to augment their own
morality tale or piece of political theater.

Aesthetically,
we no longer see something which is a clearly defined Arthurian aesthetic (arguably
one never existed since the medieval Arthurian idea was so heavily steeped in a
Christian coating). As I said before, what could be vaguely defined as an
aesthetic, has become subject to thievery by the other genres—a uniquely
decorated, and important, cup becomes the Holy Grail, Sir Gawain’s Christianized
armor is transmogrified into revolutionary modernity (A t-shirt with a
political symbol on it), while King Arthur is reduced to any authority figure
with a crown or predestined fate/career path. But, today, this appropriation
takes on a deeper quality due in no small part to J.R.R Tolkien, but more
specifically, Peter Jackson.

During
the sixties and seventies, as we know, is when The Lord of the Rings truly came into its own. Imitators of all
stripes started to write their own stories based loosely from or inspired by Tolkien’s
original works. This is what we typically call the birth of so-called “High
Fantasy”. It is fantasy with tall, battle ready elves, some kind of goblin/orc-foe,
perhaps some trinket or weapon which needs to be destroyed, and a great evil
rising on the horizon. If the Arthurian idea was a blockbuster in the Middle
Ages, then the Tolkien idea is our epoch’s blockbuster, our own Arthurian idea
re-imagined.

But
this presents a problem since the Arthurian idea has not vanished: Arthurian
texts still remain and there still is a great deal of interest in both the King
Arthur legend, Arthur-figure, and his narrative mythos. The Arthurian and
Tolkien ideas co-exist. Neither have died.

I
am not going to try and sketch out all of the difference between these two
ideas, as that is really the work of some ambitious Ph.D. candidate (of which,
I am not), but I will call attention to how powerfully Peter Jackson’s imaginings
have retrospectively altered what we see as fantasy, to the degree, where the
lines of demarcation between Tolkien and King Arthur have been blurred.

To
me, it seems that writers are fusing both traditions together. They are taking
parts from each and ending up with a hybrid form; after Peter Jackson’s
re-telling, we have a Tolkien-inspired aesthetic which disseminated itself through
popular culture. Once disseminated, young millennial imaginations, especially
when they came of age, started to explore the Tolkien idea through their own
encounters with prior fantasy (i.e., the Arthurian tradition). Whether or not
that they knew they were encountering the Arthurian tradition is not relevant,
as we see a focus on battle-elves, orc-creatures, and the like, while trappings
of the Arthurian legend have been retained; today, it is hard to even
differentiate the two influences since each are generic enough to blend into
one another, yet just unique enough to warrant investigation by genre
historians. The end result, of course, is that we have now a Tolkien-Arthurian Frankenstein’s
monster which no one knows what to do with.

But,
again, this is not to say that what is called the Arthurian-idea does not exist
on its own, because it does, it is just that it has been greatly altered.

Modern
Arthuriana is no longer interested, per se, by the Arthurian legend in itself.
What modern writers are interested in is re-telling the Arthurian legend so as to
deconstruct its conservatism.

Some
writers, yes, use it as a re-telling to justify some long-lost conservative
world which never was, such as T.H White, but others, such as Merriam Zimmer Bradley,
use the legend to push a feminist reading and flesh-out the female subjectivity
trapped within the mother text. But that is the point: that whether it is a
feminist, Queer, or Post-colonial reading, contemporary writers, by and large,
tend to only associate with the legend insofar as it acts as a template for
their own politicized fantasy world.

Because
of this, the aesthetic—whatever could really be called as such— becomes lost in
the author’s own Frankensteinian aesthetic—it becomes less about the genre
(Tolkien-Arthurian), less about the aesthetic, and more about the fusion of
genre into aesthetic (and vice versa).
The sign-systems are de-functionalized; whatever it meant to write a
neo-Arthurian text, or a neo-Tolkien text, no longer matters when compared to
the author utilizing tropes and conventions from whatever ideas they borrow in
order to build their own fantasy world re-imagined from pilfered pieces of other
ideas.

Due
to everything above, I do not see a great deal of reason as to why issues of
genre and aesthetic should be thought of in relation to the Arthurian
tradition. I am certainly not going to deride anyone who does think of these things,
since, after all, an erudite investigation could yield fantastic results. It is
just that for my own interests, in studying on the medieval and modern collide,
genre and aesthetic is not as important as understanding the conceptual
framework for how the legend survived into the modern, and found its own
expression among the ruins of postmodernity.

Monday, December 26, 2016

Wart is recovering from his outing in the
forest with Mr. Erection-connotation, when he starts to beg Merlyn to transform
him into an ant because he is so bored; again, life before video games was very
dangerous.

“and Merlyn was reduced to shouting his
[Wart’s] eddication through the keyhole, at times when the nurse was known to
be busy with her washing” (121).

Aside from reminding me of Kingdom Hearts with all this talk of
keyholes, this section is actually really funny. Just imagine Merlyn stooped
low at a door, peering through a keyhole and shouting out various facts about a
subject as Wart is being washed by his nurse. It is ripe for an animated
cartoon.

But then Wart starts to beg to be
transformed into an ant, getting the idea from his miniature glass ant habitat,
something which, I am sure, is an anachronism. Merlyn protests.

“The ants are not our Norman ones, dear boy.
They come from the Afric shore. They are belligerent.”

Only because this chapter is so filled with
conflicting, and largely unfilled political potentials, do I give White the
pass here on whether it is a racist-y thing to say that ants from Africa are
more belligerent than, supposedly, nice and tame Norman ones. There are
different species of ant, after all, and I am privy that some are more
aggressive than others, so I suppose there is nothing to freak out about here,
not yet, anyways.

So he gets transformed and lands in the
upper dirt valley of his ant habitat.

“The place where he was seemed like a great
field of boulders, with a flattened fortress at the end of it—between the glass
plates. The fortress was entered by tunnels in the rock, and, over the entrance
to each tunnel, there was a notice which said: EVERYTHING NOT FORBIDDON IS
COMPULSORY” (122).

Spooky! Do I hear echoes of a story
concerning totalitarian single-party dictatorship? I believe I do.

So Wart acts like a dupe and wanders
around. He hesitantly enters a tunnel but quickly backtrack to the surface
after the weird songs he receives through his antennae creep him out.

Back on the surface he meets another ant.
Turns out that all ants have not names, of course, but rather serial numbers, a
combination of numbers and letters. If I was a nerd with this kind of thing I
could, perhaps, riddle out some idea of coherency to the long strings of digits
White gives, but as I am not, and as I am sure there is nothing to the strings
anyways, I am just going to move on.

Wart encounters some dead ants. (I’m not
sure why dead ants are up here as, what little I know about ant societies, is
that the graveyard is located at the bottommost portion of the underground
nest.)

“They
were curled up, and did not seem to be either glad or sorry to be dead. They
were there, like a couple of chairs” (123).

I actually like this. Sure, it is part of
White’s odd diatribe against impersonal systems of rule, but it is a
beautifully expressed metaphor.

Following this lovely, yet unsettling,
sentence, White gives us an equally wonderful description of how the ant
carrying the dead bodies cannot seem to decide how to arrange the bodies; the
ant is likened to a man eating a sandwich and drinking a cup of tea with his
hands, yet wants to light a cigarette, but does not know how to make the
logical conclusion of needing to put down what he is presently eating and
drinking in order to take hold of the cig and lighter. White describes the ant
finally finding room for the body as arriving at the conclusion by accident,
like a series of random actions which finally result in the desired end by pure
chance.

Wart continues along his adventure until he
finally ends up in the tunnels, because, he is an ant, you see, and ants belong
in the tunnels. Wart becomes accustomed to the ant language. It is not the most
poetic of languages.

“There were no words for happiness, for
freedom, for liking, nor were there any words for their opposites.

[…]

Wart discovered that there were only two
qualifications in the language, Done and Not-Done—which applied to all
questions of value” (124).

My ignorance, and lack of internet
connectivity at the time of writing this, makes me wonder when George Orwell’s 1984 was written since this seems very
close to the sort of linguistic collapse we see in that classic dystopian text.

So far we see that ants do not have
individual value as lifeforms and that language is on a need to know basis. I
wonder what other macabre wonders this ant society holds.

After a misunderstanding, Wart takes the
place of an ant who fell off the edge of the colony, or something, and who now
cannot remember who he is, so the others call him insane; it seems here that if
Godwin’s law doesn’t apply to the ants, then its mental health equivalent, at
any rate, is in full swing.

But Wart enters the kitchen area where he
eats large amounts of bland gook, only to later discover that he is actually
storing it in his body to later distribute to the other ants. It is like if you
eat everything at an all you can eat buffet and then threw up in the mouths of
hungry shoppers. (Have fun imagining that?)

While he is stuffing his mandibles Wart
overhears this

“’I dew think our beloved Leader is
wonderful, don’t yew? They sigh she was stung three hundred times in the last
war, and was awarded the Ant Cross for Valour’” (126).

Wart has a curious habit of wandering
across militaristic animal societies; a commentary, of sorts, on the human
animal? Something deeper or something lighter?

So, the ants lack individuality, have a
curt language, and are formed under an aristocratic military-junta. Where is
the Proletarian Ant Liberation Army when you need them?

“’How lucky we are to be born in the ‘A’
nest, don’t yew think, and wouldn’t it be hawful to be one of those orrid ‘B’s.’’”

Haha… White’s satirization of nationalism
is great, made further amusing by its linguistic reinforcement (“hawful”
“orrid” “yew”). Aren’t we all so blessed to be born in [A Nation] instead of
that horrible [B Nation]? Thank the Queen! But, yeah, the ants are also
fiercely nationalistic.

Oh, and in a throwaway line, we learn that
the ant Queen also regularly executes her subjects, convicted of criminal
offenses not elucidated. Perhaps these criminals are ‘insane’ like Wart is
originally thought to be?

“It was not only that their language had not
got the words in which humans are interested—so that it would have been impossible to ask them whether they believed in Life,
Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness—but also that it was dangerous to ask
questions at all” (127-8).

The Americanism of this part sticks out all
the more because it is contrasted against the image of a queen, which is very
reminiscent of the American Revolutionary War of Independence. I think that
White is constructing a pastiche of negative forms of government according to
an early twentieth century progressive-liberal standard. But maybe I am wrong.

So after this off inclusion, we learn that
the ants are religious. This is where the deeper oddities come into play. But
not before fighting breaks out between two ant scouts belonging to the
different nests in Wart’s ant habitat.

“and all the streams of orders were
discontinued in favour of lectures about war, patriotism, or the economic
situation. The fruity voice [of the Queen] said that their beloved country was
being encircled by a horde of filfthy Other-nesters…” (128).

Encirclement references hawk back to Soviet
propaganda about encirclement by the Western imperialist powers, but the “horde
of filthy Other-nesters” seems a clear allusion that this nest is not so much a
communistic state as much as it is the inverse. Plus, I am not even sure how
much the idea of capitalist encirclement against the early USSR was a well-known
idea outside of the Soviet Union itself. Since this book was written in 1939 it
seems late enough, with the outbreak of World War Two, and all, but I am not
sure on the history of the encirclement thesis; besides, linguistically
speaking, I know enough that words like “horde” and “filthy” are usually
spouted by Rightists against immigrants and rival imperialist powers, not by
the early Soviet propagandists.

Following this, the reader is treated to
two kinds of ant broadcasts, both of which, are of a circular reasoning; the
first is the idea that since we, Nest A, is starving, the population should
increase so as to starve more and goad the nest into a wartime state. The
second broadcast, meanwhile, regurgitates a self-negating delusion on racial
superiority and self-defense before, ultimately, being subsumed under alleged
economic benefits (that both nests are of equal footing and acting under the
same premises but that Nest A is somehow offering the better armistice terms).
This second broadcast follows the idea that “starving nations never seem to be
quite so starving that they cannot afford to have far more expensive armaments
than anyone else, an unsettling assumption on White’s part since it connotes a
whole host of idealist positions.

But now we get to the real content.

“After the second kind of address, the
religious service began. These dated—the Wart discovered later—from a fabulous
past so ancient that one could scarcely find a date for it—a past in which the
emmets had not yet settled down to communism. They came from a time when ants
were still like men, and very impressive the services were” (129).

What makes this paragraph so confusing is
that I have no idea what White is getting at. Is he trying to say that the
setting of The Once and Future King
is actually set in a far future reversed to medieval neo-feudalism being
rebuilt under a sort of communistic regime? Is he trying to say that the ant
society, as it presently stands, is a communist society and these services are
a holdover from this ancient past? Or is White trying to speak of something
else entirely?

If it is the second, than White’s reaction
is a hilarious inability to understand basic Marxian ideas and theories,
combined with the worst of anti-communist pseudo-intellectual hysteria (the
mishmash of various negative govermentalites into a form labeled ‘communism’).
If it is the former, then that is just odd. I am leaning more heavily on the
second interpretation as it is clear that these religious rituals are not taken
seriously by the ants.

At any rate, the two ant armies are about
to fight—while Wart is growing sick of the tireless monotony and lack of
privacy which comes with ant life—before Merlyn suddenly scoops Wart back up in
the nick of time and transforms him back into a boy. Thanks, Mer!